Surprise Is a Sign Our Assumptions Might Be Wrong

Surprise Is a Sign Our Assumptions Might Be Wrong

We encounter a mass of content each day, and we’re not as likely to analyze our feelings in the moment the way we might during a guided classroom exercise. Surprise gives us a signal that our initial assumptions may need checking.

You may think that surprise is simply what you feel when something is not what you thought. That’s partly right. But consider two different situations. In the first, you’re invited to what you think is a cookout for about fifteen people, but when you arrive there are twenty-two there. Surprised? Not so much. In the second, you are invited to what you think is a cookout for about fifteen people, but when you get there, you realize it’s a book club. Or instead of fifteen people, there are three. Or two hundred. Surprised? A bit more, right?

Surprise doesn’t just indicate that something is different from what you expected. It indicates that it is different in a way or at a level that is significant. And because surprise indicates that our expectations have been violated in a nontrivial way, it can be a good sign the additional context we’ve found should make us rethink our initial reaction.

Consider the account of Wandrea “Shaye” Moss in chapter 8. She was the woman who was “caught” on video supposedly taking out “secret” containers of ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. If you saw that video framed as being about “suitcases full of ballots,” you might be upset (quite understandably). A bit of context-seeking (about thirty seconds) shows you they weren’t suitcases; they were security bins created to prevent ballot tampering. You feel surprised. “Wait, they weren’t suitcases? They were security bins?”

When learning new context, it’s so normal to be surprised in this way that it can be difficult to grasp how crucial it is. When investigating, we process a lot of information. Maybe we learn that an incident was a bit earlier than we thought or that it was in a different city than we thought. Yawn. But some things hit us differently. It’s like a scene in a murder mystery where the detective is told a laundry list of items about a crime scene but suddenly stops on a particular detail—“Wait a second, you’re saying the television was on when you found her?” The surprise indicates that some detail doesn’t fit with previous assumptions. The weird thing is, you often feel the surprise even before you fully know what it means.

We encourage you to be on the lookout for your own surprise—don’t run from it. When you do feel it, it’s a signal to stop and go back to what you initially saw or read or calculated. If you had known this new information beforehand—that it was standard security bins, not smuggled-in suitcases—would the video have been more compelling or less? And if the answer is “less,” is it possible your initial reaction was a bit off?

It takes some mental practice to cultivate a sense of surprise when context-seeking. This can be particularly true when your initial reaction was emotionally intense. Compared to the feeling of shock you might have when first encountering a video, the surprise you feel at finding out that they are called “security bins” (not suitcases) is at a distinctly lower volume. But that sense of surprise is crucial. Noticing it requires slowing down a bit. Just long enough to see if anything generates the feeling of the unexpected before you run past it. You can apply this to the overall impression, or vibe, of a search results page. Before assessing each result’s quality, ask whether these are the sorts of results you would expect for those search terms. When you pause instead of clicking blindly on the blue links on the search results page, do you find that the results feel surprising? We’re not saying you’ll always have a well-developed sense of surprise whenever you need it, but often that sense is there. You just need to give it a few seconds to take in the scene: to notice the books, the chairs in the circle, and the lack of hamburgers and grilling implements, and to realize that it feels—surprisingly—more like a book club than a cookout.